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New Study Finds No Evidence Of Racial Disparity In Police Shootings
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A recently-released analysis of officer-involved shootings in 2015 and 2016 found no evidence of systematic racism, shoring up several other studies that have said the same thing.

The new study, conducted by two psychology professors from Michigan State University and a criminology and criminal justice professor from Arizona State University, sought to determine whether there was racial disparity in death by police gunfire in the United States.

“When adjusting for crime, we find no systematic evidence of anti-black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects,” the study’s abstract read.

“Multiverse analyses showed only one significant anti-black disparity of 144 possible tests,” the study concluded.

The study said that when analyzing all shootings, “exposure to police given crime rate differences likely accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for blacks.”

The results of the new study, published by the Journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, bolstered the 2016 analysis by Harvard researcher Roland G. Fryer Jr.

That paper’s author called the results of his study “the most surprising results of my career,” The Daily Wire reported.

“On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account,” Fryer wrote in his study’s abstract.

Yet another study by the Center for Policing Equity in July of 2016 further supported the assertion that race-based officer-involved shootings were not the problem.

A study of 80 Spokane police officers, conducted by Washington State University, concluded that “officers were slightly more than three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects,” The Washington Post reported.

A column in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that multiple studies in 2016 showed that officers tended to be biased in favor of black people, if at all.

“The Black Lives Matter narrative about an epidemic of racially biased police shootings is false: Four studies published this year showed that if there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites,” Heather Mac Donald wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

“Officers’ use of lethal force following an arrest for a violent felony is more than twice the rate for white as for black arrestees, according to one study. Another study showed that officers were three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed whites,” Mac Donald wrote.

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